The Antitrust Cases That Matter

If Trump doesn’t stand firm, the American people are the sacrifice Big Tech is more than willing to accept.

Strong antitrust enforcement is key to any true conservative platform, owing to our natural skepticism toward concentrated authority, public or private. President Theodore Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil. The Reagan administration broke up AT&T. Republican Senator John Sherman gave this country its first antitrust law, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which we still use today. As Sherman famously said, “If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

President Donald Trump pledged in his inaugural address to usher in America’s “golden age” with policies that “will, very simply, put America first.” He followed up by nominating antitrust stalwart Gail Slater to head Department of Justice’s antitrust division and appointing the similarly minded Andrew Ferguson to chair the Federal Trade Commission.

But other moves have led to controversy over the administration’s antitrust stance. Trump gave front-row seats to Big Tech CEOs at his inauguration, took a deregulatory posture on artificial intelligence a few days later, fired several officials in the DOJ’s antitrust division in July, and recently settled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), all of which sent mixed signals on his administration’s antitrust agenda.

So it’s fair to ask: Is this administration rebalancing the scales of competition, or is this just limousine populism?

The Cases That Matter

Four big cases will shed light on that.

Three involve Big Tech companies (two against Google and one against Meta), while the last involves the ticketing behemoth Live Nation. These cases are low-hanging fruit for the Trump administration, and Trump pursuing them will show Americans that he’s willing to use the full force of his antitrust might to break up overt concentration that hurts consumers.

Let’s start with Big Tech cases, which Trump has consistently singled out as an antitrust target. When he nominated Slater to head the DOJ’s antitrust division, Trump lamented that “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech.” Ferguson, Trump said, has “a proven track record of standing up to Big Tech censorship.”

The reason we are dealing with such market concentration in the tech sector is the Bush and Obama administrations, which greenlit every merger that came across their desks. One staggering statistic shows that only three of the nearly 800 acquisitions by Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple during those years received publicity, while none faced serious scrutiny.

Restoring competitive markets is the only way to rein in these digital tyrants, because, as Slater has said, “[s]peech and the censorship of speech can be downstream of [tech companies’] market power.” Even Mark Zuckerberg has described Meta as being “more like a government than a traditional company,” and in that framing, he is the king.

Google Search

Google has two cases in front of Trump’s DOJ. The first involves its monopolization of the online search market; the other its complete dominance of the ad tech market. Each case can ensure not only more consumer choice within the distribution channels of information, but can also better enhance our ability to protect data.

Trump originally brought the search case in his first term. Most forget that he was widely criticized for doing so by a horde of Libertarian groups like the Cato Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute, who suggested it was part of a political witch hunt. However, Trump was vindicated in a monumental opinion from district judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, who said unequivocally that “Google is a monopolist.”

The DOJ’s proposed remedies for Google Search, which include data-sharing requirements and divestitures, can encourage better online privacy by opening data distribution channels to allow other, more privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Qwant to scale up and compete.

But for all of the bluster in his liability opinion about Google as a monopolist, Mehta took a cautious approach in his decision. He didn’t accept Trump’s proposed remedies asking Google to divest from Chrome and Android, and even rejected a prohibition against Google paying to be the default search engine for Apple’s Safari web browser. He did, however, accept the DOJ’s request to make Google share search data with competitors, which on its own is a substantial win for the Trump administration.

Even so, the administration would be on solid legal grounds to appeal most of the judge’s remedy opinion, especially as it relates to the default arrangements with Apple. A significant portion of Mehta’s liability order targeted Google’s $20 billion default arrangement with Apple as a primary tool in its search monopoly. Taking this tool away from Google can widen the market for consumers to utilize more privacy-focused companies.

Google Ad Tech

Within three months of Slater’s confirmation, she secured a victory over Google by proving that it’s a monopolist in the online ad market. Google’s ad monopoly is how the company funds its vast censorship operation. For example, Google suppressed articles on President Trump’s assassination attempt, YouTube automatically deleted comments criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, and Gmail sent conservative campaign emails to spam before its users could access them while leaving liberal emails of the same nature untouched.

Even though the Biden administration originally brought this case, it was the Trump team that initiated the probe into Google’s behaviors. In this case, the court held that the company “harmed Google’s publishing customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.” The DOJ proposes a multi-phased divestiture schedule to disentangle Google’s ad tech operation while also asking the court to impose a host of prohibitions with respect to user data. The remedy would remove financial incentives to harvest consumer data by forbidding Google from “utilizing first-party data, i.e., data on users generated from any Google property (including but not limited to YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Chrome, and Android)” to inform its bidding practices.

Better yet, Trump through this case can balance the scales for local news outlets to combat Google’s censorship. Local broadcasters and journalists are the most reliable news source for everyday Americans, because a local outlet’s primary viewers are those that live in their community.

Google’s complete dominion over the ad tech market is a leading killer of local news. These outlets compete for the same ad dollars as Google, but Google’s monopoly leaves no room for them to scale at its pace. Google also uses its power to push the price of online ads far below the market rate in order to force advertisers onto its services.

These factors make this case essential for protecting consumer privacy by removing the incentive for Google’s data mining, and will help even the odds for small-town broadcasters and newspapers in the process.

However, if Trump doesn’t follow through, consumers will be left to fend off Google’s clear market distortions on their own, which is an untenable result.

Meta

The FTC’s case against Meta can break up serious concentration plaguing the social media market. Trump minced no words when he called Facebook “the enemy of the people” in 2024. The FTC sued the company near the end of Trump’s first term for unlawfully monopolizing the social media market through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Again, the crisis is downstream from the Obama administration’s rubber stamping of mergers in the early 2010s that led to Meta (and Google for that matter) amassing so much power in the first place. Trump’s case is an attempt to right that wrong.

Now, the FTC wants Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, a divestiture that would open more distribution channels for platforms with less biased newsfeeds. Lest we forget, these platforms, as former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy once said, are “the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge.” This means that the stakes couldn’t be higher. Indeed, as Justice Neil Gorsuch alluded to in his line of questioning in Murthy v. Missouri, Meta’s ability to censor to its heart’s content, and to successfully collude with the government to shut down conservative outlets, derives from the social media market being “very concentrated.”

The courts allowing these cases to move forward demonstrates to Americans that Trump wasn’t tilting at windmills when he advanced them. The president was and is right to be concerned. Big Tech can shut down entire conversations and silence dissenters with the flip of a switch. Google’s YouTube blocks and demonetizes users who support certain political candidates or content creators who the company does not favor. Meta’s Facebook removed posts that shared a study published by the British Medical Journal—one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in the world—because the platform (not the “experts”) believed the study’s questioning of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness data constituted disinformation.

There is no reason why we should be under Google or Meta’s tyrannical rule, which allows them to force-feed us biased information or deny us access to what we want to see.

Live Nation

But the tech markets aren’t the only game in town. Trump has the same opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to antitrust in a case against Live Nation. Why? Because its alleged violations are too obvious to ignore.

Nearing the end of the Biden administration, the DOJ, along with 30 (now 40) state attorneys general across the political spectrum, sued Live Nation for unlawful monopolization of the live entertainment market under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The case couldn’t be clearer: Live Nation controls every aspect of the ticketing sector for live events, which has allowed the company to pass on exorbitant, unjustifiable fees to consumers. Even worse, Live Nation has been caught red-handed retaliating against competitors (chiefly Oak View Group) who dare to bid against it, using exclusionary contracts to lock out would-be rivals, and limiting geographic areas where artists can perform to only those venues with which Live Nation operates, among other things.

Already in this case, Federal District Court Judge Arun Subramanian has categorically denied Live Nation’s motion to dismiss the DOJ’s illegal tying claim and the attorneys general’s ability to sue. Moreover, the redress in this case can put money back into the pockets of everyday Americans and open the door for smaller venues in rural areas—home to a lot of Trump voters—to compete against venues in liberal elite cities like Los Angeles and New York.

Without Trump’s intervention, rural, working-class concert goers will continue to face extremely high user fees and limited venue options, in many cases excluding them entirely.

Why Antitrust Matters

The question now is whether these companies weasel their way out with weak deals to avoid enforcement.

They are certainly trying. Google and Meta have been hot to trot over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a bevy of promises for new investments that they may or may not actually pursue. Live Nation is actively engaging in circumvention tactics to avoid scrutiny from Trump’s DOJ.

But who cares? Everything is a negotiation, right?

Sure. But antitrust is designed to even the odds for everyday Americans. According to Slater, antitrust must facilitate “an economy that works for the American people, not the other way around.”

Without real antitrust enforcement, trillion-dollar companies can continue to exploit our most personal information, dictate the information we see, and enjoy total control over the services we can use.

These companies’ respective monopolies are exactly the kind of concentration that our founders feared. James Madison believed monopolies were the “greatest nuisances in government,” and that private companies, if left unchecked, could amass more power than the government itself.

More directly, Madison’s words to Thomas Jefferson should heed a serious warning against going soft on antitrust enforcement. “Monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few,” Madison wrote, “Where the power is in the few it is natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own partialities and corruptions.” If Trump doesn’t stand firm here, we, the American people, are the sacrifice Google, Meta, and Live Nation are more than willing to accept.